Baby Face

Hurrying through Washington's Union Station, she looked like any Government stenographer, eagerly on her way to a New York City weekend. Hatless and smartly turned out in a sporty belted coat, she carried a small valise. But Judith Coplon was no ordinary working girl. At 27, she had risen to a job which was listed by the civil service as political analyst, foreign agents registration section, Department of Justice.

Manhattan's Barnard College for girls had always expected big things of Judith Coplon. She majored in history, was managing editor of the college paper, graduated cum laude in 1943. Said her class yearbook: "Deeply philosophical about the fundamentals of life ... an astute analytical mind lurks behind a baby face and emotional brown eyes." Judith joined the economic warfare section of the Department of Justice, rose fast enough to justify her classroom promise. Her job was analyzing the records of foreign agents registering for activities in the U.S.

Waiting Santa Claus. Lively, chatty, hard-working at the office, she lived quietly alone in a $34.50-a-month room. Nights, she studied for a master's degree at American University, wrote a critical paper on "Economic Planning in the Soviet Union." Most weekends, Judith went home to Brooklyn to visit her ailing parents. Her mother had heart trouble; her father, Samuel Coplon, a retired toy merchant, was paralyzed. Samuel Coplon used to be known as the "Santa Claus of the Adirondacks": he gave away thousands of toys to country kids at Christmas. One night last week, the Coplons waited in vain for Judith. For when Judith arrived at Manhattan's Pennsylvania Station, she did not go straight home. On her devious journey, she was followed by agents of the FBI. Judith had become suspect of dealing with agents of the U.S.S.R.

The FBI men shadowed her to Manhattan's upper West Side. There she met a stocky, stern-eyed man in a dark overcoat and hat. For an hour and a half, without a betraying sign of recognition, they scurried by subway and bus around crowded Manhattan in an old familiar technique for shaking off shadowers. Finally, under the rumbling Third Avenue elevated, on the squalid lower East Side, the FBI agents closed in, arrested both of them. In Judith's purse was a thin, flat package. It contained, said the FBI, typewritten notes abstracted from confidential U.S. documents.

Disbelieving Mother. The man in the dark coat was Valentin A. Gubichev, 32, a Russian engineer, who came to the U.S. in 1946 as a United Nations employee, assigned to help build its new Manhattan headquarters. The two of them, said the FBI, had already held previous "clandestine meetings." The Russian and the girl from Barnard were charged in Federal Court with conspiring to steal U.S. documents. In Washington, the Russian embassy loudly demanded the release of Gubichev. But the U.N., acting quicker, had already suspended the Russian, said that his U.N. job gave him no diplomatic immunity. When they were hauled away to jail, the Russian remained frozen-faced, but Judith smiled cheerfully. In Brooklyn, her mother cried:

"Oh, God! No, No! It's not so. I'll never believe it!"

The U.S. public, however, was learning to believe that such things did happen, sometimes in the best of families.

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